Sam > Sam's Quotes

“It's not luck - there's probably no such thing as luck, and if there is you can't depend on it. All you can do is play the percentages, play your best game, and when the critical bet comes - in every money game there is always a critical bet - you hold your stomach tight and you push hard. That's the clutch. And that's where your born loser loses”
― Walter Tevis, The Hustler

“He’s Fast Eddie. You’ve been hustled.”
― Walter Tevis, The Color of Money

“A pool hustler had to do what he claimed to be able to do. The risks he took were not underwritten. His skill on the arena of green cloth – cloth that itself was the color of money – could never be only pretense.”
― Walter Tevis, The Color of Money

“Under political correctness, saying the right thing supplants doing the right thing.”
― Michael J. Knowles, Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds

“People who worry about microaggressions usually have never faced macroaggressions.”
― Michael J. Knowles, Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds

“Boundaries must constrain free speech if only to protect speech, as in the case of laws against sedition or rules against the heckler’s veto. Tolerance cannot tolerate intolerance. And openness cannot leave itself open to closed-mindedness.”
― Michael J. Knowles, Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds

“Until the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Texas v. Johnson, which created or recognized, according to one’s point of view, the constitutional right to burn the American flag, the law could prohibit desecration of venerated objects. Now courts hold that the First Amendment protects flag-burning.29 And yet in 2019, an Iowa judge sentenced thirty-year-old Adolfo Martinez to fifteen years in prison for the “hate crime” of stealing and burning a rainbow flag, which symbolizes colorful sexual desires.30 So in fact, the government still outlaws desecration of venerated objects; it’s just that the objects of veneration are different.”
― Michael J. Knowles, Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds

“There will never be a firm ‘wall of separation between church and state,’... because all laws invoke a moral order, and any moral order relies upon religious tenets.
p. 167”
― Michael J. Knowles, Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds

“Civilization cannot stand for nothing.”
― Michael J. Knowles, Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds

“Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” declared George Washington in his farewell address.43 Benjamin Franklin observed, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
― Michael J. Knowles, Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds

“Irony thrives in liberal and decadent societies because it permits the evasion of responsibility. One never need commit too much. The ironic utterance of a phrase or performance of an action allows one to conceal his true motives. He may mean what he says, or he may mean the opposite; in any case, no one can ever hold him to account.”
― Michael J. Knowles, Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds

“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
― Thomas Sowell, Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
― Thomas Sowell

“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. ”
― Thomas Sowell

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace; and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.”
― Thomas Paine, The Crisis

“Sanity is not statistical.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”
― Ayn Rand

“The things you used to own, now they own you.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World